


Not Seeing Forest for the Trees - When Characters Become More Important to Fans than Story

by shadowkat67



Category: Angel: the Series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV), Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Torchwood
Genre: Character Death, Essays, Fandom Allusions & Cliches & References, Framing Story, Literary References & Allusions, Meta, Multi, Reviews, Russell T. Davies Era
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-23
Updated: 2013-03-23
Packaged: 2021-02-27 06:40:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,273
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22382722
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shadowkat67/pseuds/shadowkat67
Relationships: Jack Harkness/Ianto Jones, Tara Maclay/Willow Rosenberg
Comments: 3
Kudos: 5
Collections: March Meta Matters Challenge





	Not Seeing Forest for the Trees - When Characters Become More Important to Fans than Story

From a brief discussion online..I got to thinking about two things that bewilder me about fandom and part of my issue with fandom:

It regards:  
a) Turning Fictional Characters into Icons for a Social Cause and what happens when the story and/or writer either has the characters betray that cause or die

b) Character Deaths, or more specifically controversial character deaths which the fandom took personally or as a personal affront.

 **a. The tendency to turn fictional characters into icons for social justice causes.** Example: Buffy Summers as a feminist icon, or Ianto (and/or Tara) as an icon for the LGBT movement or the Tara/Willow and Ianto/Jack relationships.

I get part of this tendency...the innovative coupling or use of the character by a writer. For example - Whedon went against tradition and made the vampire slayer, a girl, crazier still a valley girl named Buffy, who was a former cheerleader, popular (well at one point) and tiny. Normally vampire slayers are lone wolf types, male, and/or geeky like Corey Feldman in Lost Boys or the guy in Fright Night. They aren't pretty girls who want to go to prom. Going against the stereotype, and empowering the girl - who is usually the first to be slaughtered in these stories - sort of meant she'd become a feminist icon for a lot of tweens and women who loved the genre but never found anyone to identify with in it. But it's also dangerous - because Buffy at the end of the day is JUST a fictional character created by a self-proclaimed third generation television hack, who grew up reading Marvel comic books and watching General Hospital, and lots of 1970s Westerns. She's a character in a story. Making her an icon is bound to disappoint you eventually, because sooner or later the story will let you down. If the character is written at all well - she'll have human flaws and fall off the iconic pedestal, and even if she's not, she is bound too...because the writer isn't writing an icon, he's a writing a character to make a living.

But fans do it. To the extent that the message or symbolism that they've given the character either consciously or subconsciously takes precedence over story. If the writer kills the character or worse has the character do something that is contradictory to this message the fans espouses or believes in - the fan blasts the writer, fellow fans who still love the character and/or writer's writing, and the story in general.

Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. I know I've done this, so I get this in a way...and I find myself questioning the tendency in myself. I think it's natural...to make a character, fictional or otherwise into a role model, an icon. We have even done it with cartoons or drawings. Certainly with celebrities and writers. But again, it is dangerous...because they can't stay on that pedestal or in that status for long. And we often worship ...forgetting the flaws.

We want perfection in our heroes. It makes me think of the Hopi Native Americans or maybe its the Navajo, that put a flaw in all their artwork...believing that to do otherwise brings bad-luck, it blasphemes nature, and traps the devil. There's something to that, I think.

Woe to the writer who kills the icon, or worse an iconic pairing that represents a fandom's cause...because you may well end up with a boycott. Love turns to hate in a flash. The once revered writer is now despised. The tv series banned and hated. The plot ignored. The writer may have or may not have intended the pairing or character to fit that cause. Nine times out of ten it is accidental. I seriously doubt Whedon created his characters for this purpose...mainly the writer is unaware of his or her audience as they are creating the characters. Or they may feel and justifiably so that to treat this pairing as special and immune to the dictates of their universe is offensive and it is better to treat them the same as all the others. After all, RT Davies most likely thought, if I am going to kill Tosh and Owen, shouldn't I also be okay with killing Ianto? To treat one as better than the other or more special is not fair to any character and offensive to me, a homosexual man - it would bug me if another writer did that. Much as Whedon likely felt in regards to Tara...should I treat Tara any different than I would have treated OZ in her place? Isn't that worse?

Granted it is annoying when writers kill people off to further the plot but it is also realistic. People die. We are mortal. To have a series where no one but the red-shirts or guest-stars die is a bit silly and unrealistic and 1960s. Death has less resonance. And death is the only non-temporary thing in our lives. It gives life resonance and meaning. We would most likely take life for granted without it. For Willow - the worst thing for this powerful female character who wants to control everything in her life is to have the person she loves most taken from her, as a freak accident, something she cannot control, rewind or change. Same is true of Jack Harkness - the worst thing for this character who can't die and is immortal is to face mortality with the death of the person he loves. IF it wasn't painful - it wouldn't resonate, it would not mean anything. For a character who, particularly in Children of Earth, seems to be fairly blaise about other's lives as well as his own, to lose the one person he loved the most and control...is important, it makes him aware of the temporariness of life - something he'd forgotten.

But when you get so wrapped up in the iconic pairing or your own love of a character - you lose all that. You lose the story. Fans of Tara/Willow and Ianto/Jack lost the story, in much the same way that fans of Spike did or fans of Angel or Buffy. Their vision narrowed to a pinprick and they lost the big picture. They did not see everything else. And that's the cost of making one character or pairing representative of your social cause.

b) **This leads me to the other problem, where we become way too emotionally invested in one character or pairing.** To the point that we wish to dictate to the writer what they should or should not do with the character or pairing. This intensity of emotion...is often what gives "shippers" a bad name and causes kerfuffles. Unlike (a), the individual who has become obsessed with the character isn't so much turning the character into a cause or icon, as turning the character into a personal best friend/boyfriend/girlfriend. OR they may just identify strongly. Something about that character resonates on a deep subliminal level - and the viewer falls in love. I understand this, actually, I've fallen in love with characters and wanted desperately to figure them out and get more of them. And I've stopped watching tv shows or reading books or comics, where that character is summarily killed off. Or the writer threatened to kill them. But I've noticed some fans take it to extremes, and like me, we lose the story.

The other day at work, I ran into my bud, Will, he feeds the squirrels in Rufus King Park. He groused to me that his squirrels all lost their homes, because they chopped down all the trees. You'll see when you go, he told me. I wasn't planning on walking around the park that day, a)it was cold and b) my leg hurt (back issues), but curiousity won out and I went. What shocked me was hardly any trees were gone. Just one - a big, beautiful, oak, which clearly had to be chopped down before it killed someone. But Will saw that tree gone and it didn't matter, might as well have been all the trees. This is similar to the fan who adores one character in tv series or book above all the others, and when that character is killed much like Will and his favorite tree - the writer might as well have killed all the characters. Like Will they don't see why the writer had to kill the character, why it was necessary for the story or how it furthers it - they just see the dead character. That's all. They can't see the forest for the trees.

This is true in life as well.

When a loved one dies...we scream at the universe or God, and ask why did you take this person from me? As if the only important beings in the entire universe are well this person and me. Which of course is incredibly myopic or self-centered. We can't see past ourselves. Or that maybe this person's death makes way for another life. Or how it advances things. It's not apparent to us, it can't be. We can't see past our own lives - we do not have the ability. But while reading fiction or watching it...we can actually see the broader picture, we can see the string of events that lead to this moment (assuming the story is written half-well, it isn't always) and we can see that if that tree didn't go, it would have screwed up the park and the life in it. Or not. It's hard to know for certain. Tara died so Willow would be forced to confront her inability to deal with having no control over things. She also died to further Buffy and Dawn's arcs...both had begun to rely on Tara as a sort of substitute for Joyce. In a way its an echo of Joyce's death. Ianto died ...to demonstrate the importance of life to Jack - who had become somewhat callous. Or he died merely to show how we can't control everything and there are bound to be casualities, much like Anya dies at the end of Buffy. OR Spike dies. Or the entire Angel Investigations team most likely dies entering that alley at the end of Not Fade Away.

It's the writer's commentary on the one thing we all fear and cannot control - the loss of our loved one's to death. In our tweens, teens, twenties and even thirties we feel immortal, as if nothing can hurt us...death seems like a story in a book unless of course we suffered from it directly, in which case it is all too real, and we grow up faster. By the time we reach our 40s, most of us have lost people dear to us, and death begins to become more and more of an unwanted companion.

If we didn't care about the character who is killed, the death would have little meaning. Much like the red-shirts in Star Trek. The show would be too safe.

But fandom doesn't tend to see it this way. Often they over-react. They hate the writer. They hate the other fans. They scream and yell and grieve loudly as if someone killed their own child or parent. The death becomes about the fan, not the character, the story is gone, all the fan sees is the character's death. It is all that matters. They create shrines and memorials to the character. The character is more than the series. It doesn't matter that other characters died in the series, or even why that character did. They feel betrayed. As if the writer killing that character was a personal assault on the fan, even though the writer most likely has never met them or even if they did...the story matters to the writer and there are a lot of fans. Not all agree. And if you cater to one...how do you cater to the others? After all if RT Davies let Ianto live for the Ianto fans, shouldn't he also have let Tosh and Owen live? Shouldn't he had let others? Where do you stop? Sometimes you have to remove a tree to plant another. And in a series like Torchwood, which is admittedly horror, if you don't kill off main characters, does it make sense to kill any...and will the audience take you seriously?

I'm not saying you shouldn't grieve for a favorite character or set up a memorial. But I am saying that if you can, try to step back a bit and see the story, but it in perspective. If not today, tomorrow - when you can think a bit more clearly, granted tomorrow may well be 10-15 years from now.

I loved the character of Spike, I did not always like how the writers chose to tell his story, but I understood why and I saw their story...which works for me and doesn't at the same time. I'm glad I took the time to see their story. Because it was an interesting, if not always a good one. Same with Tosh and Owen, I may not have liked how it ended, but I can see no better ending and it worked. Stories...are how we deal with what scares us, they are how we figure out who we are, what we want, and how we should go about it - they are wonderful what-if's...told in a safe setting. With multiple outcomes. No story is set in stone, but our own, and even that is constantly being re-written in the stars until we die and rejoin whatever maker created us.


End file.
